MIR Editor

At the edge of the woods, imaginations run as wild as the animals, and lives shrink to the size of a village clearing. Those who live in the forest are told to fear its depths, warned of beasts that hungerly stalk the shadows ready to gobble up careless little girls.

ou hate your work. This is the first thing you’ve painted in a year. If you were back at college, you’d smash it where the other girls could see or leave it outside the rec room to be stolen. But here it is, tucked under your arm while you edge along the harbour wall, mid-morning,…

I have my father’s eyes. They stare back at me in the mirror. “You’ll never make the baseball team,” they are saying. Rows of boys in letterman sweaters—a snapshot of the American Dream. “God bless President Kennedy,” they are saying. They are not me.

Just as she will allow none but she to cut the children’s hair and nails, so she will allow none but she to tend to her plants. Eight and possibly nine baby seedlings poke their small heads from the soil of the chilli plants container and she is delighted.

We named him Miles because when he was born, he was kind of blue. The umbilical cord was wound tight around his neck, the same way I used to wrap the telephone cord around my finger, sitting in the hallway, talking about boys

I am a Warder at the Gallery of National Art and I pass each day in silence. I sit in a narrow chair and watch the pictures on the walls, the people who wander by and the motes of dust in the thick air.

To tell you the truth, I don’t like to remember that day, or the days that followed, but the memory of it is fresh. I can recall that hot afternoon vividly and in detail, when that man showed up at our doorstep.

Margrit Silvia Twist lived across the road from a retirement home. As she closed the front door behind her, she noticed two young carers smoking out of their patient’s window.

Mel will be the first one to turn up and there’ll be a yard-long prep list on the workbench so she’ll start with roasting squash for the soup. She’ll get the stock bubbling and skim its greyish foam.

The release bell rings and I join the men as they fill the landings, a crowd of testosterone swaggering along the hallways, down the stairs, into the dining hall where they jostle and talk so loudly I want to jam my fingers in my ears.